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What students feel about
Writing for Webheads

Part 2: Rank the questionnaire

Questionnaire Instrument | Raw Responses | Tabulated Results | Interpretation

In February 2000, Michael and I conceived of a plan to poll the class regarding what they liked and thought could be improved with Writing for Webheads. The plan had three parts:

• First, ask the students what was important to them about the class This got the students discussing our teaching methodology.
• From that produce a list of items and return it to the students to rank
• Elicit commentaries on specific questions we wanted to know about.

The following are responses to the second part of the survey ...

Questionnaire Instrument

Michael and Vance exchanged emails on the responses from students on what they said they liked about the class, and eventually reached agreement on the instrument, which was distributed to the students in an email worded as follows:

From Michael, February 22, 2000

To help us know how the Webheads community has been useful for you, can you please put the following points in order.

Which do you think have been most and least useful to you in this class?

Please re-order the list, putting the most useful first (or, if it's easierfor you, you can number the items, most useful first):

() I can get my writing corrected.

() I can ask any question regarding English (I can ask questions that I can't ask in my daily study.)

() I can get help whenever I am in doubt.

() There's no participating time limit. (It is absolutely flexible. You can do it any time you want (or not)

() Making friends with different teachers

() Making friends with students from different parts of the world.

() General cultural exchange - Knowing customs of different countries. (Getting to know about different cultures and customs using English as the base language)

() I can write without being fearful of making mistakes.

() It is nicer than the usual methods of learning English.

() It provides practical English. In this class you can learn slang and other expressions that nobody taught you before

() You don't have to pass an exam. Pupils are in the e-class just because they want to learn or enjoy practicing English.

() You learn different kinds of English

() You can have a Free web-site

() teachers are willing teach the English language without being paid. It's free!

() Other reasons (please specify)

Any other comments about the class?

Many thanks in advance,

Michael and Vance.

Raw Responses

To date, 12 students have responded. Their responses have been moved to an unlinked file for the time being.

Tabulated Results

Here are the results with 12 students responding from around 35

I entered the data in the chart with the result from each student listed in a column. Then I reordered the responses so that the lowest numbers were arrayed from left to right. This gives us an idea of which items were of most importance to the respondents. The rows were then sorted on the 1st data column, 2nd and so on to kick the most highly regarded responses to the top of the list.

Other possible ways to sort: take a sum of the first three columns, first four, and so on (not just the first two because of the data skew from the student who answered so many "1"s. I did the sums for these as a check on results.

Results show increasing values as we would expect except in two cases:

• Ask an question regarding English becomes a more important reason than no fear of mistakes and making friends with teachers
• Nicer than the usual methods of learning English falls three places behind cultural exchange, no time limit, and friends with students

A sort on column 1 will restore questions to original order (useful for entering data from future respondents).

Interpretation

Conclusions from the Results

The results indicate that the things students like most about the class are:

The last item could be the third most important reason.

The following things also appear to be important to students:

The second item above could be the least important of the five items

Finally, the following items appear to be of least importance to the 6 respondents:

However, there are serious flaws with the study (at least so far)...

Only 11 of 35 (exact figure needed, less than 38) students responded, which is 11 (of xx students who have kept current with course this year).

Respondents self selected, so only the most positive feelings of the group were reflected. It would be interesting to discover what a lurker gets out of receiving 1141 emails (the number sent to efiwebheads@egroups.com so far). But there are xx students who have sent only 1 or fewer messages to the eclass.

I get the sense when going over the data that on receipt of the questionnaire, students took the email they received and started numbering from the top of the list, only realizing as they went that there were 15 items which would need numbers ranging from 1 to 15. Therefore items at the top of the list tended to get low numbers and those further down higher numbers. Thus the study was possibly flawed by biasing students toward the first items presented in the questionnaire instrument.

A number of respondents gave different items in their list the same ranking, including one who skewed results by giving several items a 1 ranking, one gave some items an x or dash (-) ranking, and one student introduced an additional item and rated it 3 though it was similar to one already in the list which he'd rated 9. These disparities probably had little bearing on the overall results, which appear fairly consistent through the 3 ranking procedures applied above.